I agree. It's suspect because the numbers don't add up. From the article:

" [...]Tom Lee notes that U.S. households owe an estimated twenty five billion dollars in capital gains taxes due to crypto gains."

Total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies, as of 12:18PM EST on April 6, 2018 is $248,821,531,204.

According to Mr. Lee, each $1 taken from the market will result in a $22.50 decrease in aggregated market value (avg. of his estimated range, "$20 - $25").

     25B * $22.50 = $562.5B   

He's suggesting that the price impact on cryptocurrencies required to pay for capital gains is going to be double the current market capitalization? Am I misinterpreting the statement he made?

The alternative explanation I can come up with is if the statement was poorly formed and what he was really talking about was $25B in investment income will need to be reported and the appropriate short-term or long-term tax rates would need to be applied.

Rough, back of napkin estimation, assuming an even distribution between short-term and long-term capital gains tax rates--which isn't going to be accurate, but I don't have a better way to estimate for this analysis--would be:

    Short-term: $12.5B * 28%[1] = $3.5B
    Long-term:  $12.5B * 15%[2] = $1.875B
    Total Estimated Taxes Due: $5.375B

    Estimated impact on total market capitalization:
    5.375B * $22.50 = $121B

That would leave $127B in the market, or if evenly distributed over all tokens, all prices would be half of their current values after April 15 (e.g. today's $6.6k BTC would be $3.3k BTC).

That doesn't sound right, either. Am I totally off-base for both interpretations?

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[1] Making an educated guess about the "typical" cryptocurrency investors' income bracket, but without actual numbers I'm open to this estimate being higher than reality.

[2] https://www.fool.com/retirement/2016/12/11/long-term-capital...